Sixteen UN personnel in Haiti dead, up to 150 missing

The UN chief said 16 UN personnel were confirmed dead in the earthquake that shook Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince, with 100-150 UN workers still unaccounted for, including the mission chief and his deputy.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that 11 Brazilian peacekeepers and five international police officers - three from Jordan and one each from Chad and Argentina - were killed in the "horrendous" quake.

UN officials said 56 others were injured. Seven who were seriously hurt were evacuated from the country, they said.

"Many continue to be trapped inside UN headquarters and other buildings," said Mr Ban, noting that includes the UN's mission chief, Hedi Annabi, and his chief deputy, Luis Carlos da Costa.

"Other peacekeepers and civilian staff from many member states remain unaccounted for."

UN peacekeeping chief Alain Le Roy said at least 10 people were pulled alive from the lower floors of the five-story headquarters building for the UN peacekeeping mission, which collapsed in Tuesday's magnitude 7.0 earthquake.

Mr Annabi, a Tunisian diplomat who has worked for the UN for 28 years, and Mr da Costa, a Brazilian whose UN career spans four decades, were missing.

Also unaccounted for was an eight-member police delegation from China that Mr Annabi was meeting in an office on the headquarters' top floor when it collapsed, UN officials said.

"It is our estimate that around hundreds of people were still working inside the building," Mr Ban said. "Therefore it will be in the range of 100-150 that I'm quite concerned about."

Mr Ban said he was immediately dispatching Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Edmond Mulet, who was Mr Annabi's predecessor in Haiti, to Port-au-Prince to take over as acting chief of the UN mission and coordinate the international emergency aid effort.

The UN chief said Mr Mulet would arrive this morning and hold immediate meetings with Haiti's President Rene Preval and Haitian officials.

"Most urgently is the emergency search and rescue: People buried under the rubble are still alive. We must save them, as many as possible, and we must move immediately," Mr Ban said.

"To the people of Haiti, I say this: We are with you. We are working quickly, as fast as humanly possible."

Mr Ban's former spokeswoman, Michele Montas, a well-known Haitian journalist, was visiting family when the quake struck.

In an e-mail received by UN staff, Ms Montas said she was OK but Port-au-Prince "is 80% destroyed," said Ms Montas' successor, UN spokesman Martin Nesirky.

"Saw hundreds of bodies in the street this morning and people trying to reach survivors under buildings and carrying the wounded on doors and makeshift stretchers. Most everything above one-story has been levelled," and there have been "more than 30 aftershocks," Ms Montas wrote in an e-mail as read aloud to reporters by Mr Nesirky.

Mr Le Roy said the Villa Prive and the Hotel Montana, where a large number of UN staff lived, also were damaged. He said it was not known how many UN personnel were in the buildings at the time.

Helen Clark, head of the UN Development Programme, said 38 UNDP staff are unaccounted for, including 10 believed to have been in the building adjacent to the agency's main office, which collapsed.

The UN's Haitian mission - spread across the country - includes 7,000 peacekeeping troops, 2,000 international police, 490 international civilian staffers, 1,200 local civilian staffers and 200 UN volunteers, he said.

The force was brought in after a bloody 2004 rebellion following decades of violence and poverty in the nation.

Mr Le Roy said the 3,000 troops and police in Port-au-Prince are securing the airport and port, patrolling, and helping to clear roads in addition to digging in the rubble of the collapsed headquarters building.

The UN is operating out of its logistics base near the airport, which was not seriously damaged, he said.